Zoho Calendar Steps Out of Beta

At Zoho, we have several applications that need/have calendaring functionality. Some of these apps include Zoho Mail, CRM, Projects, Planner, Meeting etc. To consolidate all calendars, we launched Zoho Calendar in beta last year. The goal for this separate application was two fold. One, it has to be one of the best calendar applications in the market and Two, it has to integrate/replace other calendars apps within the Zoho suite.

Today, Zoho Calendar is stepping out of beta and we believe it is mature enough to be considered one of the best Calendaring apps in the market. Zoho Calendar’s latest update comes with an extensive set of features for business use.

Let’s look at some of these new features.

Multiple Calendars

Users can manage multiple calendars in Zoho Calendar. Events created for each calendar are color coded. Apart from multiple personal calendars, you can also subscribe to external calendars, again color coded.

Calendar Sharing

You can now privately share your Calendars with other members with a Zoho account. There are several options for sharing your calendar. There are two options for sharing your calendar in read-only mode and two options for read-write mode. In Read-only mode, you can share your calendar with other users where they can just view only Free/Busy times while the second option provides all your event details with others.

We also offer two options in Read-Write mode. One option lets other users edit your existing events while the second option lets other users create/edit events on your calendar. This option basically gives complete control of your calendar to another user. This will be useful when you have your assistant managing the calendar for you.

To share your Calendar, go to Settings > My Calendars and choose the ‘Share’ option. You just need to provide the email address of the person you want to share your calendar with.

Subscribing to Calendars

There are couple of options to import events to Zoho Calendar. One option is to import all your events in a single shot using ‘Import by file’ or ‘Import by URL’. The second option is to subscribe to an external Calendar. Importing is a one time event while subscription updates your calendar regularly. In this version, we now added both options.

We also have options to subscribe to external and internal calendars. By Internal Calendar, we mean, calendars from other Zoho Applications. You can now subscribe to Zoho Projects & Zoho CRM Calendars. To do this, go to Settings > Subscribe to and select the Calendars you want to subscribe to. In case of Zoho Projects, if you are part of multiple projects, you can even subscribe to a specific project.

You can subscribe to any external calendar, in ICAL format, by providing the URL. This updates your events couple of times a day.

You can also subscribe to your Friend’s public calendars using their email address. We also have built-in calendars for holidays which you can subscribe to. We plan to expand this built-in calendar list as we move forward.

Subscriptions are not just one way coming into Zoho Calendar. You can also take your calendar events outside Zoho by enabling private address for your calendars (under My Calendars > Share) and subscribe to your Zoho Calendar in other external Calendar clients like iPhone.

Embedding Zoho Calendar

Want to embed your calendar on your blog? No problem. Option to embed your calendar in external sites is a new feature in this update. Obviously, your calendar has to be public to do this. We have ten different templates to choose from and you can also customize the options for the embed.

It is important for a Calendaring app to make the input easy. So we added NLP support. In the ‘Smart Add’ section of Zoho Calendar, you can type in something like ‘Meeting with customer on Friday at 3pm’, Zoho Calendar will create the event for you on Fri at 3PM.

Agenda View

If you want to look at all your events in a grid view instead of a Calendar view, we now have that option. You’ll notice a new ‘Agenda’ tab on the top where we list all your events as a list.

Additional Features

These were just a few features. This major update includes several other goodies like the option to sort your calendars in settings page, option to clear your calendar etc. Zoho Calendar is also available on mobile devices like iPhone/Android @ http://mobile.zoho.com. A plug-in for Outlook is also available to synchronize events. We also have an Open Social gadget that lets you embed it in external apps like Gmail, iGoogle.

We hope you are as excited as we are. We will keep improving the app and will focus on integrating this app into other Zoho Applications. This Calendar application will become the default Calendar in apps like CRM, Projects and more. Meanwhile, as always, your feedback will be very much appreciated.

I like to see that Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects are now (probably 1 way) syncing with Zoho Calendar. Although, I’m surprised that in Zoho Mail it is still not possible to “Add a Meeting”. It’s still just possible to “Add a Task”.I also miss 2 way syncing with Apples iCal (Macbook, iPad, iPhone).Anyway, keep up the good work!

I like to see that Zoho CRM and Zoho Projects are now (probably 1 way) syncing with Zoho Calendar. Although, I’m surprised that in Zoho Mail it is still not possible to “Add a Meeting”. It’s still just possible to “Add a Task”.I also miss 2 way syncing with Apples iCal (Macbook, iPad, iPhone).Anyway, keep up the good work!